Le Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:39:42 +0100, Christophe Huriaux <c.huriaux@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit:
Hi,
Hi, welcome to Haiku :)
I read on the Haiku GSoC page the idea of developing an API to expose Web Services to Haiku applications. I already have worked on web services implementation (both server and client part, using cURL) for my own dirty projects, and I found very interesting to work on this idea for a real interesting project like Haiku. I'm new to Haiku development, so I have some questions about this proposal. I indeed read old (march '09) mailing list posts about Services Kit, dealing about what should it expose to other applications, but I'm not used to Haiku development habits and have some interrogations on how must this be done (i.e: via a shared library ? a daemon ?).
It would be a "kit". This may include whatever you need to make it work. For example, the network kit include the "net server", the media kit includes the media server, the interface kit relies on the app server to do all the graphic card management.
A server is, in Haiku words, what would be called a daemon in UNIX. Communication between the server and applications would be done trough BMessages, that are at the core of Haiku's API.
Depending on how you design the services kit, it may or may not need a server : would you want it to handle the http stuff then broadcast the same message to multiple applications ? or would each application be alone connecting to a service ?
Looking at the mailing list, it looks like the kit could also use add-ons and replicants : these are two kind of plug-ins systems we use in Haiku. A "twitter" add-on would allow an application to send text to twitter, and, with the same API, a "facebook" add on will send the same thing to facebook. This would look a bit like the translation kit, that does the same for file formats. In Haiku, an application using the translation kit will be able to save/load pictures in jpeg or png format without any difference. And the settings are kept in a central place. Each fileformat is an add-on and can be plugged to any application. As they share the same API, it is possible to add new add-ons and use them in old applications.
As said on the list last year, the IMKit (doinf the same for IM protocols) may also be worth a look. It can be quite near to what the service kit could look like.
-- Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy http://pulkomandy.ath.cx
